50 x 63. 50 volumes- 63 issues

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Publicado por el POLIS RESEARCH CENTRE. Universitat de Barcelona

50 x 63

50 volumes -50 volúmenes

63 issues - 63 números

Antoni Remesar

Editor. CR POLIS. Dep. Arts and Heritage. Universitat de Barcelona aremesar@ub.edu

Abstract

On the w@terfront, a modest academic journal, has focused its activity to the research and dissemination of issues related to Urban Design with special emphasis on Public Art and Public Space; Urban Regene-ration processes with their involvement in new forms of urban governance, especially in empowering citizens through the implementation of creative processes of participation.

Open to all kinds of external collaboration, we can not ignore that, over the years, it has nurtured the activity carried out by the Centre Polis Research (University of Barcelona), the development of various research projects funded competitively;the conferences and the seminars organized by PAUDO (Public Art and Urban Design Observatory) and the academic activities of both the Public Space and Urban Regene-ration doctorate programme and the Master in Urban Design: Art, City, Society, taking into account that these academic activities have contributed to various European and Latin American universities a number of graduates that now are practicing academic and research activities.

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vol.50, nr.1, January the 20th, 2017 ISBN: 1139-7365

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Resumen

On the w@terfront, una publicación académica modesta, ha orientado su actividad a la investigación y difusión de temas relacionados con el Diseño Urbano con especial incidencia en el Arte y el Espacio Públi-co; los procesos de Regeneración Urbana con su implicación en las nuevas modalidades de gobernanza urbana, especialmente en el empoderamiento de la ciudadanía mediante la puesta en marcha de proce-sos creativos de participación.

Abierta a todo tipo de colaboración externa, no podemos obviar que, durante estos años, se ha nutrido de la actividad desarrollada por el Centro de Investigación Polis (Universitat de Barcelona), del desarrollo de diversos proyectos de investigación financiados competitivamente, de los congresos y seminarios organizados por el PAUDO (Public Art and Urban Design Observatory) y de las actividades académicas, tanto del programa de doctorado Espacio Público y Regneración Urbana como del Máster en Diseño Urbano: Arte, Ciudad, Sociedad, teniendo en cuenta que estas actividades académicas han apor-tado a distintas universidades europeas e iberoamericanas, una serie de titulados que ejercen en ellas su actividad académica y de investigación.

Resum

On the w@terfront, una publicació acadèmica modesta, ha orientat la seva activitat a la investigació i difusió de temes relacionats amb el Disseny Urbà amb especial incidència en l'Art i l'Espai Públic; els processos de Regeneració Urbana amb la seva implicació en les noves modalitats de governança urbana, especialment en l'empoderament de la ciutadania mitjançant el desplegament de processos creatius de participació.

Oberta a tot tipus de col·laboració externa, no podem obviar que, durant aquests anys, s’ha nodrit de l’activitat desenvolupada pel Centre de Recerca Polis (Universitat de Barcelona), del desenvolupament de diversos projectes d’investigació finançats competitivament, dels congressos i seminaris organitzats pel PAUDO (Public Art and Urban Design Observatory) i de les activitats acadèmiques, tant del programa de doctorat Espai Públic i Regneración Urbana com del Màster en Disseny Urbà: Art, Ciutat, Societat, tenint en compte que aquestes activitats acadèmiques han aportat a diferents universitats europees i iberoame-ricanes, una sèrie de titulats que exerceixen en elles la seva activitat acadèmica i de recerca.

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On the journal title

Finally, let’s answer a recurring question, why the magazine is named On the w@terfront?. When in 1998 we released the first volume of the publication, the team was developing a research pro-ject related to the study of waterfronts. This subpro-ject would give rise, both to the organization of a series of international conferences (Remesar, A, 2000), and at the head of the journal. We chose on the w@terfront in reference to Elia Kazan's (1954) film of the same name that focuses on vio-lence and corruption amongst longshoremen while detailing widespread corruption, extortion, and racketeering on the Hoboken waterfronts, New Jersey.

The at sign of the head, also indicates our willingness the publication be on-line and its diffusion done in internet. 1998 - 2007 2008 - 2009 2008 - 2011 2011 - 2015 2015

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On the journal formats

When we started the activity, the technical means at our disposal were not those we currently have. For example, the PDF format was not standardized as a format for reading text and image files.

Thus, the volumes 0 to 3 have a landscape design that responded to the duplicity of construction of the magazine. On the one hand, it was accessible in HTML format which allowed us to introduce video and sound, as in the case of the number 0 dedicated to Public Art in Cardiff. Moreover, a PDF version could be printed on both CD and read on screen

In 2003, we decided to use the PDF format. Thus, the magazine’s design changed from landsca-pe to portrait format. In addition, the magazine was organized following the models of journals published on paper. Each number had an editorial (generally in three languages) and a conside-rable number of articles. This fact meant that the rate of publication did not reach more than two issues per year. As it turned out, they were more books than, properly, a journal.

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On the experience of the e-book format

The gradual extension of the use of readers of e-book, parallel to some recommendations made by the Vice-chancellor of research at the University of Barcelona to achieve an improvement in their presence in various international rankings, determined the modification of PDF format for a tighter reading fin the e-book readers

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Fig. 3 The 5 volumes published in pdf to fit the e-book format.

On joining RACO

In 2011 we joined the RACO system. RACO (Catalan Journals in Open Access) is a cooperative re-pository where can be consulted, in open access, the full-text from articles of scientific, cultural and scholar Catalan journals.

“The main purpose of RACO is to increase the visibility and consults of the journals inclu-ded and to spread the scientific and academic production published in Catalan journals. This purpose makes specific in three aims:

- To encourage the electronic edition of Catalan journals

- To be the interface that allows the whole search of all the journals - To provide the instruments for its preservation

RACO works with the open source program Open Journal Systems (OJS), a software deve-loped by Public Knowledge Project (PKP) with the objective to promote the access to the investigation, making easy the management and publication of scientific journals. This application allows to do, among others, searches by author and/or title of article and by title, subject or the publishing institution of the journal. Of each article it is possible to consult the recommended bibliographic citation and export to Mendeley, statistics, recom-mend readings to colleagues, etc. It also offers the possibility of subscribing to the alert service of anyone of the journals included to receive by e-mail the notice of the new pu-blished issues.

Journals included in RACO are those that contain a table of contents, that have articles of over 3/4 pages and are signed by the author, are published by a Catalan scientific, cultural

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or scholar institution, or his language is Catalan or his content it’s about history or Catalan culture (more information).

The table of contents and the full-text of articles are introduced in RACO by the own publis-her institutions, in our case the CRAI (Resource Centre for Learning and Research) at the University of Barcelona. Most of the journals offer the full-text of all the published issues is offered. Nevertheless, in some journal it can have a delay between the introduction of the table of contents and the full-text (consult the Open Access Policy). The full-text articles included in this repository are freely accessible, but any act of reproduction, distribution, public communication or total or partial transformation is subjected to the conditions of use of each journal and could require the express and written consent of their authors and/ or publisher institutions.

The RACO repository uses the interoperability protocol created by Open Archives Initiative (OAI) which allows to increase the visibility of the articles published in journals offering oneself together with other international repositories. Also, in order to increase the articles dissemination and consults, these are also available through University Union Catalogue of Catalonia (CCUC), and electronic resources databases (such as Ex-Libris and EBSCO). Moreover, RACO helps improving the included journals quality thanks to the document “Criteris mínims amb què ha de comptar una revista científica” developed by Facultat de Biblioteconomia i Documentació at Universitat de Barcelona. These criteria are related to the journals formal presentation and to their articles in order to increase their quality and therefore their merits for admission to bibliographic databases and thus get more impact”. (CSUC / BC, 2017)

The volume July 18, 2011, marks the beginning of the adaptation of our magazine to open ac-cess criteria specified by the RACO’s platform.

On the front cover as an editorial

This adaptation meant the disappearance of short editorials that, to date, initiated each volume. The access in RACO is made by articles and not by volumes. Once we access the publication (via news or archive) you go forwAard to the table of contents.

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As shown in the example, the first access also presents the cover of the publication. When ac-cessing the file function all the covers appear.

This was the reason that led us to turn the cover into an editorial, playing with:

(1) the title of the volume (in Spanish and English) and ,

2) with the image that was to do-minate an important area of the frontcover.

Thus, the work of the editor, besides the functions related to the contents of the volume, is also to find the title and the appropriate image for “the editorial”.

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On the series

Some topics have been recurrently addressed in our journal, generating thematic series Interdisciplinarity , public space and urban cohesion

The whole of our research projects are based on an interdisciplinary approach to any of the topics we study: public art, public space, urban regeneration, governance, civic participation or social remembrance.

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Remembrance

From the project for the Mural of Remembrance in Baró de VIver (2010-2011) the subject of rescuing social memory has become part of our research interests, as shown by the projects to recover the remembrance of the old Women’s Prison in the district of Les Corts (2003-2006) or the present participatory process initiated in Bon Pastor for the development of the space me-mory system in the neighborhood

Urban Decorum: public art and urban arts

Certainly, in many issues of the journal, these topics have been addressed. Indeed, for some time, our research is paying attention to the study of urban decorum. In this sense, we move forward in a reconsideration of what can be understood as Public Art by introducing a critical analysis of these contemporary practices known under the rubric of urban art.

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On some relevant data

The inclusion of the journal in the RACO system allows us to have some relevant information about its dissemination.

Diffusion

The RACO criteria for posting the queries to the journal are as follows

1. An article search is defined as an access to abstract page, or as the direct download of the full text when it’s not made through its own abstract page.

2. Robot’s automatic accesses, both those that search the file robots.txt as other that we’ve detected, are not counted as searches. Are also excluded accesses from CSUC (Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya ) addresses.

3. These statistics include only queries from RACO.

4. To determine the queries per country are used GeoIP APIs.

The graph shows that including the magazine in RACO was an excellent option. Also that some changes of editorial criterion had positive effects. In the title of this volume we point out that, throughout our life we have published 50 volumes, but also 63 numbers. This means, especially since 2014, that in order to improve our presence in the networks, we distribute the content of a volume in several numbers, guaranteeing a more continuous presence..

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Internationalization

The next graph shows that according to the records in RACO, most of the readers of the journal do not come from the Spanish State, but are distributed among people from different countries (mainly Europe, America and Asia)

We also have indica-tions that the presence of the journal in RACO has made possible its incorporation to various sources of indexation and evaluation, as it appears in the following graph obtained from the MIAR (Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals)

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On the most visited articles

RACO allows to obtain the list of the 30 most visited articles. It can be seen in the following tables how, as the journal has evolved into new content, the number of visits to certain arti-cles has also evolved. It is also seen the increase of visits per article in relation to the general increase of visits to the journal.

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Data available in RACO (since 2011) allow us to perform some analysis. A first fact: articles in Spanish are in the top places in the rankings of top 30 made by RACO.

We studied the data from three articles to perform a first analysis. The figures drawn from these data show that there is a clear increase in consultations from 2013-2014.

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We note that there are items that have a stable and continuous conduct (such as the article by Lecea), while others burst hints suddenly after some years of missconsultation. This would be the case of the article on the wharf of El Waffe. First published in 2004, during almost 10 year has relatevely few hints, until 2014 that will begin to have a considerable number of hints.

If we observe the “temporal persisten-ce of the articles” and their behavior, we will conclude that we publish time-less articles, that is, articles that, at a certain moment, we do not know the reasons, attract the attention of the users. It is the subject of the article and not its novelty what can attract users. Another important fact. The differential between hints and downloads is relati-vely small, indicating that access to the articles also means their download.

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If among the most visited articles since 2011 (RACO data) we choose those that have been in position 1, in an intermediate position (15) and in position 30, we can appreciate (1) The most outstanding articles (position 1) Have a considerable increase in visits from 2013, while the in-crease is much lower for those in the intermediate or final position. (2) The difference between the most visited and least visited articles increases considerably.

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The study of these 18 positions offers us a result of 15 articles and not 18 as we might expect. This is due to the fact that 2 of the analyzed articles repeat the first position two or three times. The following figure shows, starting from the initial date of inclusion of the articles, its position between the year 2011 and the year 2016.

As we can see in the graph, 50% of the articles, highlighted in green, maintain, as previously noted, a behavior of temporal persistence, some always in the upper positions, others climbing positions and, finally, others remaining in the middle or lower range.

The analysis of these articles also allows us to elaborate a certain semantic spectrum about the topics most treated in the journal. Based on the keywords of each one of them, we have elaborated an inclusive categorization that allows to group the items into homogenous se-mantic fields.

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If above we could contrast the degree of internationalization of the magazine in relation to the visitors, the following figures show how this factor of internationalization is also present in the contributions we receive. The first graph shows the “geography” of all articles published by the magazine, taking into consideration the institution of origin of who sign the articles.

Many of the articles are based on case studies, standard procedure in research on content covered by the magazine. It is curious to note how the case studies are also subject to interna-tional patterns of geographical distribution, partly related to the experience of researchers. The second graph shows the geographical distribution of the case studies analyzed in the 16 numbers that are the basis for this analysis

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Buenos Aires Porto Alegre Perú Costa Rica Maputo Barcelona Leeds Portugal, Lisboa, Almada EE.UU Cuba México

Costa Rica _Venezuela Colombia Perú Brasil Argentina Portugal U.K.

Spain Francia_Italia

Finlandia Líbano Turquía Grecia Irán Japan China Malaysa Australia Bulgaria

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References

CSUC / BC. (2017). Raco. Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert [web site]. Retrieved from http://raco.cat/ index.php/raco/about

Equip MIAR 2016. (2016). MIAR (Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals) [Website]. Retrieved from http://miar.ub.edu/issn/1139-7365

Remesar, A. (2000, present time). PAUDO. Public Art and Urban Design Observatory [website]. Retrieved from http://www.ub.edu/escult/paudo/waters.html

Acknowledgemets

The publication of the 50 volumes has been possible with the support of the Spanish projects PB95-0897, PB98-1251, BHA2002-00520, HUM2004-22086-E, HUM2005-00420, HUM2006-12803-C02-01, HUM2009-13989-C02-01, HAR2011-14431-E, HAR2012-3087 and the Catalan 2005SGR0150, 2009SGR0903, 2014SGR0068

In these first 50 volumes, we have posted a total of 255 articles written by 207 authors. This sug-gests that a good portion of the articles responds to teamwork.

In short, we can congratulate ourselves for the work done. We have created a publishing platform for junior researchers, but it does not avoid the contributions of the seniors ones. We have been able to constantly increase the rate of publication, attracting the attention of resear-chers from around the world ;the number of hints and the number of downloads. Everything in-dicates that the issues we publish escape the effects of trendy topics that also shake the world of research. Now we have to hope that we can get to number 100, boomig, step by step, the access to the publication. If we also improve our position in the indexing and evaluation systems much better for the journal and for the researchers who have contributed to reach this height of a race that, many times, is ungrateful